Masha Gessen - The Man Without a Face

It appeared Magnitsky had uncovered an embezzlement scheme that involved the tax authority as well as the courts in at least three cities: had the judges not been in on the deal, they would hardly have rubber-stamped judgments with such ease and speed. Nor would the tax authority have processed the refund so fast—or at all, considering that Browder’s lawyers had already filed six different complaints alleging the theft of his companies—had the entire scheme not been orchestrated at or near the top of the agency.

Browder, ever the ideologue, saw an opening. By now he believed that his own banishment from Russia had come from the very top: even if he still did not know the exact reason, he could believe that someone whose toes he had stepped on could have conspired to convince the president or someone very close to him that Browder was an undesirable. But now Browder had a chance to save Russia all over again. “There is no way the president of the country could allow $230 million of the country’s money to be stolen,” he reasoned. “I mean, the tax crime is so cynical. If you made a move about it, people would say it’s just too far-fetched. We expected SWAT teams and helicopters to swoop down from the sky and get all the bad guys.”

Magnitsky wrote fifteen different complaints aimed at exposing the embezzlement and starting an investigation. But instead of SWAT teams swooping down from the sky, criminal probes came raining down on lawyers Browder had engaged. Seven attorneys at four different law firms received notice that they were being investigated on various criminal charges. At this point Browder knew enough to offer all of his lawyers refuge in Great Britain. “You know, I was trained as a financial analyst,” he told me a couple of years later, in part by way of explaining how difficult the process had been for him, in part by way of justifying why it took him so long to realize the full gravity of the situation. “I wasn’t a soldier. I wasn’t trained that people would be putting their lives at risk. And I went to every single one of our lawyers and I said, ‘I am truly sorry that this has happened. It was not my intention to have put you in physical harm and it is not my intention to leave you in physical harm and I want you to leave Russia at my expense, and come to London at my expense, and stay in London at my expense.’ It wasn’t an easy conversation to have with any of these guys. They were all in their forties, at the top of their careers, some of them didn’t speak a word of English. And I was asking them to give up their lives, their professions, their whole community, to go into exile at a moment’s notice to protect themselves from danger.”

Six of the seven lawyers accepted Browder’s offer and moved to London. The one who refused was Sergei Magnitsky, the accountant, at thirty-six the youngest of the group—which was how Browder explained his refusal to himself: “Sergei was from a generation who thought that Russia was changing. There was a new Russia, maybe an imperfect Russia, but a getting-better Russia. The basic fundamental principles of law and justice existed—that was his premise. He said, ‘This is not 1937. I’ve done nothing wrong and I know the law. There’s no legal means that they could come and arrest me.’”

On November 24, 2008, Sergei Magnitsky was arrested in connection with the very embezzlement scheme he had tried to expose. Like his client three years earlier, he was certain at first that it was a misunderstanding that would soon be cleared up with the help of his lawyers. At his first court hearing, he argued he should be released, among other reasons, because his young son was ill with the flu; he was clearly certain his ordeal would be over in a matter of days. Not only was he not released, however, but the conditions in which he was held deteriorated steadily as he was shuttled back and forth between two Moscow jails. He was not allowed to see his wife or mother. His became ill and was consistently denied the medical care he required. On November 16, 2009, Sergei Magnitsky died in prison at the age of thirty-seven.

After his death, the prison released to his family his notebooks, in which Magnitsky had meticulously copied every complaint, appeal, and request he wrote: once he realized that his arrest was no misunderstanding, he had waged a fierce one-sided battle, writing 450 documents in his 358 days in jail. He created an encyclopedia of the abuse he had suffered. He described the overcrowded cells in which he was reduced to eating and writing while sitting on his cot. In one of the cells, the glass in the windowpanes was missing and temperatures inside hovered around freezing. In another, the toilet—or, rather, the hole in the floor that served as the toilet—overflowed, flooding the room with sewage. He described being systematically denied hot meals and, often, any food at all for days on end. Most egregiously, he was denied medical attention even as his chronic abdominal pain grew so severe he could not sleep, even as he wrote letters documenting his symptoms and spelling out his legal rights regarding health care. He died of peritonitis.

Browder and his investment fund staff were finally fated to become soldiers. They launched a highly visible, vocal, and effective campaign they called Justice for Sergei Magnitsky. They collected copious evidence against the people who had been connected to the jailing and torture of their colleague and against those involved in the embezzlement scheme he had uncovered. Within a few months, bills that would require visa bans and freeze any local assets of these officials were pending in the U.S. Congress, the European Parliament, and parliaments of European Union member states.

BY THIS TIME, the dominant Russia story had finally changed in the U.S. media. It had taken most of Putin’s second term in office to transform the narrative: “emerging democracy” slowly gave way to “authoritarian tendencies,” which gradually yielded to a picture of what had become for all intents a criminal tyranny. Back in 2003, when Khodorkovsky attempted to talk to Putin about corruption, the global organization Transparency International ranked Russia as more corrupt than 64 percent of the world’s countries: in its annual rating it looked slightly more corrupt than Mozambique and marginally less corrupt than Algeria. In its 2010 report, the organization showed Russia as more corrupt than 86 percent of the world: it now fit in between Papua New Guinea and Tajikistan.

Russia finally lost its bona fides in the eyes of international business and media. Browder was spending his time criticizing the Russian regime not only in the world’s parliaments but also at forums such as the annual big-business gathering in Davos, Switzerland. Andrei Illarionov had resigned his post. “Everyone had their own turning point,” he explained to me. “Mine was Beslan. That was when I realized it was a modus operandi. There was the real possibility of saving lives, and he [Putin] opted instead for the killing of innocent people, the killing of the hostages. I mean, I was at work, and I could watch and listen, and I could see it all clearly close up. I could see that if the standoff continued for at least a few more hours, lives would be saved, all of them or most of them. There would be no attack and the children and their parents and their teachers would be saved. And if this was the case, then there could be only one explanation for storming the school building when they did. It all became clear to me that day, September 3, 2004.”

Illarionov resigned his position as sherpa—Putin’s personal representative—to the Group of Eight; winning Russia’s full membership in the G8 had been one of Illarionov’s main accomplishments. “Being an adviser is one thing,” he explained. “Being an adviser is being an adviser: it’s an important post, but it’s not the same thing as personally representing someone. And I told my employer that under the circumstances I could no longer function as his personal representative.”